Bannon also contradicted Trump on North Korea: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Which all the Pentagon heads know too. Which is why any hysteria around this is just that. Not that that excuses Trumps dick waving, but that is all it is.

I don’t understand the Bannon’s play here… Is he trying to set himself up for a post-Trump role? Why give this to a far-left publication? Is this a far-fetched ploy to peel off some of the far-left to support the administration or something?

The alt-reich are such tools. Bannon first encountered them when he ran a gold-farming operation, seriously. He pissed them off, and they killed his operation. But he saw how they got all worked up and figured he could co-opt them for his own purposes. Just like he paid peanuts to grinders to farm gold for him, he realized he could pay even less - essentially just ego-stroking - to the alt-reich and turn them into political grinders for his own benefit.

I don’t understand the Bannon’s play here… Is he trying to set himself up for a post-Trump role? Why give this to a far-left publication? Is this a far-fetched ploy to peel off some of the far-left to support the administration or something?

I have to imagine post-Trump role is what he’s thinking about. I don’t know what that role will be, but honestly I don’t even know what he wants. Maybe he’s sick of Trump and he just wants to sink him. Maybe he’s trying to position himself as not-awful-enough that a publisher will pick up a book he’s writing. Maybe he was just high on meth at the time.

The possibility that Bannon may leave the White House raises the question of what Trumpism might look like without its leading architect in the West Wing.

while he was on vacation, Steve Bannon’s assistant tracked him down

Does his audacity know no bounds!? The tipping point will surely come when he dares to try to put a call through to Mar-a-Lago.

Bannon hoped that the Democrats continued to make Republican racism a centerpiece of their pitch: “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

There sure seemed to be a lot of people talking about the “failure of identity politics” back at the start of the year. On the other hand, “those guys are Nazis” is a darn good selling point.